A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. ~Shelby Foote

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Some more thoughts on bias

I saw this post, and it got me to thinking. It's usually pretty easy to find bias, on either side of any issue, that is out front and fairly easily discerned. What's much harder is to find the bias evident in what is NOT reported, or what is NOT presented. The link above is a good case in point-- just looking at those photos, it's easy to think, 'Yeah, those are all good photos, I can see why they won the award.' It's only if you step back from the photos and realize what's NOT there, photographs of the reconstruction, photographs of schools reopening, photographs of the soldiers playing with Iraqi kids, that you realize that these photos are also a form of bias. Certainly all of the photos selected are good, but there are only two reasons why they don't include many, some would say any, positive images: 1) The selectors chose not to include any, showing either explicit or subconscious bias against the U.S. military and the War in Iraq, or 2) No "real" journalists took any, showing a tremendous amount of bias on the part of the AP photographers. I say "real" journalists, because it seems that lots and lots of other people, mostly our soldiers, have no such problem finding positive images from Iraq.